‘Alien: Covenant’ and the Nature of Horror via FilmSchoolRejects.com

I just read a great article about the latest Alienfilm and the evolution of horror.

Much has changed in the 38 years since Ridley Scott’s Alien was first released. The claustrophobia and primality of that first film have given way, in Alien: Covenant, to expansive planets, lost civilizations, and ponderous mythologies.

But the prevailing impression left by Scott’s latest installment is less of horror than of existential gloom. The threats it conveys feel at once larger and more diffuse than any one creature.

The original Alienis, in some ways, explicitly Darwinian: it is about one species struggling to survive the predation of another more well-adapted one. Alien: Covenant has its share of creepy contagions working their way into various orifices, but the cat and mouse game between alien and human turns into something far weightier, if somewhat less affecting.